Jib Kidder is the longstanding recording and performing project of Ann Arbor, Michigan based musician and artist Sean Schuster-Craig. Over the course of 2 decades, he has explored a variety of approaches to psychedelic collage. Thru his compositions, video art, poetry, visual collages & shrines he has attempted to harness the humor and ambiguous poignancy specific to the experience of dreaming.

Just as in dreams, where contradictory duality is not just a phenomenum but a rule (the school that is also one’s office; the grandmother that is also one’s son), and likewise in the LSD experience (the object that is simultaneously curved and straight; the pattern that is both still and in motion), SSC’s work centers on the fluid containment of opposites and the slippery quest for the aha moment. Within his music, astute listeners will feel the vibrant tension of these balanced oppositions - of anxiety within tranqulity, of feminity within the male body, of obsessive perfectionism within punk carelessness - wiggling forth in an attempt to understand what words cannot capture. 

While remaining unknown to nearly everyone - and for an artist briefly signed to a major indie and featured more than once on network television this is an almost-impressive invisibility - his work has nonetheless garnered quiet praise from a strange mix of consummate artists: Freak Nasty, Brian Eno, Mark Ronson, Alex Grey, Julia Holter, Panda Bear & Noah Wall.

The undisguised influence of Bass, IDM, Underground Rock, Opera, Keroncong, Marrabenta, Noise, Drone, Vietnamese guitar, Free Jazz & Film musics on his work have led to accusations of shape-shifting, of identitylessness. A wider zoom instead reveals the health of an omnivorous diet and the destructive role of genre in turning artists into parodies of themselves. What can seem incoherent up close is revealed from afar as a sure-footed comfort with ambiguities, as a fearlessness and a refusal to disguise or bury contradictions. If any one thread ties together his varied work, it is a belief that novel recombination is at the heart of the creative act, not its periphery.